Sylvia Velazquez’s shrine to the Virgin Mary in her South Los Angeles home was once adorned with a mug, pencils and an agenda from Alexandra Lozano’s law firm — an image of Lozano’s long, blond hair, her signature red lipstick and her wide smile stamped on the branded merchandise.
The 57-year-old Mexican immigrant often prayed to the holy figure, asking her to protect Lozano, a famed immigration lawyer whom she had paid $15,000 to help her get a U.S. visa.
“When I signed my contract with Lozano, I got home and I cried to my virgencita,” said Velazquez, who works as a hairdresser out of her home. “This woman seemed like a good person who could help me.”
It all felt like divine intervention, she said, until a few months ago when the Washington State Bar Assn. brought a disciplinary action against Lozano. The bar’s statement of alleged misconduct said Lozano employed non-legal staff to deliver scripted sales pitches with false information to prospective clients, and sought U.S. visas for clients on humanitarian grounds, knowing that they weren’t eligible.
In her response, Lozano denied any misconduct but agreed to resign permanently from the practice of law in Washington and all other states and jurisdictions in which she had the right to practice. That includes California, where Lozano had an office in Commerce.
Neither Lozano nor her lawyers responded to requests for comment from The Times.
Lozano’s practice stood out for its sheer size alone. As of this spring, Lozano’s signature was on 53,923 visa petitions pending before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to the Washington State Bar Assn., which said clients were typically charged a flat fee of $10,000 to $15,000.
The Lozano case comes as immigration scams have surged nationwide, with advocates saying unscrupulous lawyers take advantage of people desperate to stay in the U.S. amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration.
Immigration officials point to a sharp increase in visas submitted under the Violence Against Women Act as a sign of possible fraud. Claims under VAWA rose by 360% from 2020 to 2024, according to USCIS, which released a memo last year narrowing guidelines for the visa category.
“Many of these folks spent every single dollar that they had saved with Lozano,” said M. Lucero Ortiz, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic. “They don’t have any more money for private attorneys.”
The clinic, along with Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission, a Boyle Heights-based nonprofit, have identified at least 62 immigrants in Southern California who were Lozano clients.
Her firm, known as La Luz del Camino Legal and before that as Alexandra Lozano Immigration Law, employed 750 employees as of 2024 and had offices in 13 states, according to a civil suit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle on behalf of former clients.
“It … is probably the biggest immigration catastrophe that we’ve seen in the history of immigration law,” said Vicente Barraza, one of the attorneys who is suing Lozano in federal court.
The pending civil suit claims that Lozano and her associates promised “miracles” to immigrants using “Mexican cultural and religious imagery.” Lozano falsely claimed that clients were eligible for visas on grounds that they were victims of domestic abuse or victims of sex trafficking, the suit said, often without the clients’ knowledge. The suit seeks unspecified damages for claims including legal malpractice, breach of fiduciary duty and racketeering.
Barraza said Lozano’s clients are at risk of being deported if their visa applications were fraudulent.
“It’s a real tragedy,” Barraza said. “The people that she had sworn to serve ethically are now being placed in removal proceedings, and they’ve lost tons of money.”
Attorneys for Lozano filed a response to the suit, saying legal fees are at the heart of the skirmish, and that “plaintiffs have recast that dispute as a sprawling racketeering enterprise.”
Angelo Calfo, an attorney representing Lozano, said in a statement to the Associated Press that clients were expected to review their applications before signing and blamed them for any false statements. He didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Times.
“Alexandra’s practice has always been to fight for her clients, zealously pursue every lawful option available to them, and support their efforts to build lives in this country,” his statement said.
A lawyer of miracles
Lozano pitched herself as a lawyer of miracles. She stood in front of paintings of the Virgin Mary in most of her social media posts, reaching thousands of immigrants desperate for immigration relief. The Lord’s Prayer was printed on the back of her business cards. She promised speedy results, even in the most impossible cases.
The religious approach appealed to devout Catholics such as Velazquez, an immigrant from Mexico who spent three decades without status in the country, cutting hair from her home and cleaning houses when business was slow. Her immigration status made finding steady work a struggle, she said, and yet she managed to wire at least $350 every month for almost three years to the firm. She said she paid a total of roughly $15,000 for Lozano’s services, including a $1,500 retainer and other fees.
Lozano told Velazquez she qualified for a visa through her citizen son, who was 26 at the time of her application in 2022.
Velazquez said that what she didn’t fully understand was that the application — which was being submitted through the Violence Against Women Act — hinged on a false claim of abuse from a child. Lozano’s office didn’t explain the visa category, Velazquez said.
“She had no right to tell me I qualified for such a thing,” Velazquez said.
Velazquez said that Lozano did succeed in getting her a work permit and a Social Security card. That’s not unusual, according to Michigan-based immigration lawyer Robert Alvarez, who said those documents are typically granted on an emergency basis when applications for humanitarian visas are filed.
Even so, her application for a humanitarian visa is still pending, and Velazquez said lawyers have told her the odds are that it will be rejected.
Velazquez said she recommended at least 27 friends and family members to Lozano’s office over the past four years, including a cousin, Lucila Perez.
Perez said she had a phone interview with someone at Lozano’s law firm in July 2024, who assured her she’d qualify for a so-called T visa. She said she quickly signed a contract with the firm, which quoted her just under $12,000. Only later, Perez said, did she learn that a T visa was for victims of human trafficking and that her circumstances wouldn’t qualify her for it.
The Mexico native, now 45, sold churros and doughnuts in the streets of South Los Angeles to keep a roof over her two youngest children. She wired money to Lozano in monthly payments over two years, hoping a work permit and Social Security card would be waiting for her too.
Instead, all that arrived in the mail was a notice for a USCIS appointment in Los Angeles scheduled for early September. Perez said several lawyers have warned her she might be detained for deportation at that hearing.
The two cousins are seeking legal help, but they say the lawyers they have consulted charge at least $7,500, which they can’t afford.
“I want someone to help me. To give me at least an ounce of relief,” Perez said. “All I want is to hear that I’m going to make it out of this. That I’m going to be OK. Because the truth is I have no idea what to do.”
Immigration cases have also flooded the court system in recent months, leaving most nonprofit and pro bono law firms at capacity, Ortiz said of the Loyola clinic.
“The most unsettling part of it is that now they may be in a complex immigration position, where they need an expert attorney who’s going to charge them money,” Ortiz said. “It’s very difficult to get a pro bono or a low bono attorney to take on a complex case like that.”
A life-changing field trip
Lozano has said it was a school field trip to Guatemala as a teenager that led her to become an immigration lawyer.
“I wanted to fight for human rights after that experience in Central America,” she told CALO News.
In that interview, she said she wasn’t Latina herself but took the surname Lozano when she married her husband. In public documents, she is identified as both Alexandra Lozano and Alexandra Lozano Kennedy.
She received her law degree from Seattle University in 2008, according to the Washington State Bar Assn. Her first jobs were at traditional law firms she described as “toxic, cutthroat, and unsupportive,” she wrote in her 2018 book, “Be the CEO of Your Law Firm: Gain Control, Turn a Profit, and Reclaim Your Life.”
She started her own firm in 2012 but struggled to make money because she failed to make profit a priority, she wrote in the book. Soon after, she and her family moved to Mexico, where she ran a small practice remotely for a couple of years.
In 2014, Lozano said she moved back to the U.S. after a hurricane hit Mexico. She was seven months pregnant at the time and needed more stable income, so she shifted focus to her business, she wrote.
By 2017, the law firm was a seven-figure business, according to Lozano’s written account, fueled in part by her decision to market it as a brand. Her firm’s logo utilized the Mayan calendar because it was a “noticeable and memorable” symbol to her ideal clientele. The logo’s colors resembled the Mexican flag.
She received a mentorship award from the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. in 2016 and her alma mater gave her the distinguished alumna award for her immigration advocacy, according to the biography accompanying her book on the Amazon website.
Lozano traveled the country sharing her formula for success, and started AMIGA Lawyers, an association for female attorneys seeking guidance in the business world.
Asking the Virgin for forgiveness
The visa applications submitted by Lozano will now probably come under review by USCIS, said Ortiz, the attorney with the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic.
“She would tell every single person that walked through her door that they qualified for something, when a lot of people don’t,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz said all clients of Lozano should submit a Freedom of Information Act request with USCIS to gain access to their immigration file and consult a reputable lawyer to decide how to proceed with their case. USCIS officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
More than 5,700 people have registered to join the civil suit filed in Seattle against Lozano, according to the attorney Barraza. Six hundred twenty-three people from California have registered, he said, including 233 from the L.A. metropolitan area, although none have yet been added.
Velazquez said she hopes to join the lawsuit.
In June, she stood in front of her shrine to the Virgin Mary. She stared at Lozano’s merchandise, which had sat at the feet of her statue since 2022.
For years, Velazquez kept the merchandise as a reminder of the decades of struggle she faced before crossing paths with the lawyer of miracles. Now, her cousin was probably facing deportation, and she feared she’d be next.
She grabbed the pencil, the mug and the agenda, and tossed it in the trash.
“I’ve had to ask the Virgin Mary for forgiveness, because this woman just used her,” Velazquez said. “I asked her to forgive Lozano too, because she used her to get to us — to trick us into giving her all of our money.”
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